The admirable Klassiki streaming service, in response to some modest proposals from myself, is now showcasing five movies from central Asian film-makers, and the first is this absolute gem from Kyrgyzstan. It is an autobiographical movie by writer-director Aktan Abdykalykov, much acclaimed on the European festival circuit on first release in 1998: a very personal and immediate film, but with the mystery and calm of a folk tale. It’s a story of the director’s own childhood, and he casts his own teenage son Mirlan as himself. Beshkempir has the fluency and candour of something by Satyajit Ray and its ecstatic retrieval of memory makes me think of Fellini’s Amarcord.
The film is mostly in black and white but starts in colour and enigmatically gives us flashes of colour throughout, picking out significant images with stabs of rapture: birds, a stretch of sky, a handful of money. We begin with a child’s adoption ritual, the colour of this sequence focusing on the richness of the rugs used and the traditional cradle. We then flashforward 13 years or so and this same baby is now a tough-looking kid, impassively looking at us as he gets his hair cut; this is Mirlan Abdykalykov who reminds me of Shane Meadows’s regular Thomas Turgoose.
The boy is Beshkempir, always larking about with his cheeky mates instead of helping his gloweringly resentful dad around the house. They steal honey and release a cloud of bees while they’re doing it. Their hormones freak them out at the sight of any girl or young woman, and they actually spy on a naked woman applying leeches to her skin, a fascinating and comic moment of transgression. Most bizarrely, they sculpt a sand model of a woman, with crude approximations of anatomy, take turns having sex with it and are then surreally interrupted by a herd of cattle which trample over the recumbent sand woman while the kids flee; it is a moment captured by Abdykalykov in an overhead shot, an inspired touch which Fellini would surely have enjoyed. But Beshkempir and his best mate are to fall out over the fact that one local girl very clearly prefers Beshkempir. The mate challenges him to a fight which the friend humiliatingly loses and, in his rage and spite, blurts out what he considers to be Beshkempir’s shaming secret: that he is adopted.
A confrontation between the boys’ mothers provides catharsis of a sort; things stabilise, but then Beshkempir’s adored grandmother dies and it is her wish that he deliver a traditional oration at her funeral, proclaiming that he will repay debts claimed by any of his grandmother’s creditors, while forgiving any debts owed to her. The old woman has asked for Beshkempir to do this, not any of the adults, because she wanted him to take on an adult responsibility; it’s a strangely affecting moment. There is a gentle, unforced artistry in Abdykalykov’s film which unfolds to the sound of distant birdsong throughout: it’s a great pleasure to have it revived .
• Beshkempir, the Adopted Son is available from 19 October on Klassiki.
